Alex Asup, a chief product officer at LOVELAND Technologies has produced a fascinating documentation of the decay of Detroit neighborhoods using Google and Bing Streetviews.
The most shocking thing about the photos is that the decay he documents takes place in such a short period of time, between 2009 and 2013.

The NSA set fire to the Internet’s future. The people in this room are all the firefighters. –Edward Snowden at SXSW Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower in exile, spoke to the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas today. He appeared via a choppy videostream which was said to be routed through seven proxy servers. Joining [...]

The FISA court has granted the Justice Department its fourth extension to respond to the request by Google and Microsoft to lift the gag order preventing them from revealing details of their work with the government.

9to5Mac has a rundown of the talent recruited for Apple’s iWatch team, the latest being fitness experts. They are also apparently examining wearable competitive products like Jawbone Up, a wristband and app that tracks how you sleep, move and eat.

While I don’t have a problem with Americans buying safe drugs from Canadian pharmacies, it’s a bit skeevy for Google to be profiting from YouTube content selling cocaine and prescription painkillers to teenagers. It smacks of James Franco in Spring Breakers.

The impact of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA continue to reverberate. Internet users are growing increasingly antsy about the personal data being tracked (and handed over to the NSA) by the big search engines, and are turning to the independent search engine DuckDuckGo in ever greater numbers.

Silicon Valley phenoms including Alexis Ohanian, Robert Scoble and Tim Draper appear in a video to raise money for small businesses hit by Hurricane Sandy. Nobody should give up their day jobs, but that’s part of the video’s appeal.